Political Participation
- A closer look at nonvoting
- Alleged problem: low turnout compared with Europeans, but this compares registered voters with the eligible adult population
- Common explanation: voter apathy on election day, but the real problem is low registration rates
- Proposed solution: get-out-the-vote drives, but this will not help those who are not registered
- Apathy not the only cause of nonregistration
- Costs here versus no costs in European countries where registration is automatic
- Motor-voter law of 1993 (which took effect in 1995)
- Did not create a general boom in vote turnout
- Did increase registration among eligible voters
- Did not change the two party balance of registrants
- Did increase the number of independent registrants
- May actually add registrants who are less likely to vote
- Voting is not the only way of participating
- The rise of the American electorate
- From state to federal control
- Initially, states decided nearly everything
- This led to wide variation in federal elections
- Congress has since reduced state prerogatives
- 1842 law: House members elected by district
- Suffrage to women
- Suffrage to blacks
- Suffrage to eighteen- to twenty-year-olds
- Direct popular election of U.S. senators
- Black voting rights
- Fifteenth Amendment gutted by Supreme Court as not conferring a right to vote
- Southern states then use evasive strategies
- Literacy test
- Poll tax
- White primaries
- Grandfather clauses
- Intimidation of black voters
- Most of these strategies ruled out by Supreme Court
- Major change with 1965 Voting Rights Act; black vote increases
- Women's voting rights
- Western states permit women to vote
- Nineteenth Amendment ratified 1920
- No dramatic changes in outcomes
- Youth vote
- Voting Rights Act of 1970
- Twenty-sixth Amendment ratified 1971
- Lower turnout; no particular party
- National standards now govern most aspects
- Voting turnout
- Debate over declining percentages: two theories
- The percentages are real and the result of a decline in popular interest in elections and competitiveness of the two parties
- Parties originally worked hard to increase turnout among all voters
- The election of 1896 locked Democrats in the South and Republicans in the North
- Lopsided Republican victories caused citizens to lose interest
- Leadership in the major parties became conservative and resisted mass participation
- The percentages represent an apparent decline induced, in part, by more honest ballot counts of today.
- Parties once printed ballots
- Ballots cast in public
- Parties controlled counting
- Most scholars see several reasons for some real decline.
- Registration more difficult: longer residency, educational qualifications, and discrimination
- Continuing drop after 1960 cannot be explained
- Refinement of VAP data to VEP data also reveals a decline
- Universal turnout probably would not alter election outcomes
- The percentages are real and the result of a decline in popular interest in elections and competitiveness of the two parties
- Debate over declining percentages: two theories
- From state to federal control
- Who participates in politics?
- Forms of participation
- Voting the most common, but 8 to 10 percent misreport it
- Verba and Nie's six types of participants
- Inactives
- Voting specialists
- Campaigners
- Communalists
- Parochial participants
- Complete activists
- Causes of participation
- Schooling, or political information, more likely to vote
- Church-goers vote more
- Men and women vote same rate
- Race
- Black participation lower than that of whites overall
- But controlling for SES, higher than whites
- Level of trust in government?
- Studies show no correlation
- Difficulty of registering; as turnout declines, registration gets easier
- Several small factors decrease turnout
- More youths, blacks, and other minorities
- Decreasing effectiveness of parties
- Remaining impediments to registration
- Voting compulsory in other nations
- Ethnic minorities encounter language barriers, whereas blacks are involved in nonpolitical institutions
- May feel that elections do not matter
- Democrats and Republicans fight over solutions
- No one really knows who would be helped
- Nonvoters tend to be poor, black, and so on
- But an increasing percentage of college graduates are also not voting
- Hard to be sure that turnout efforts produce gains for either party: Jesse Jackson in 1984
- The meaning of participation rates
- Americans vote less but participate more
- Other forms of activity becoming more common
- Some forms more common here than in other countries
- Americans elect more officials than Europeans do and have more elections
- U.S. turnout rates heavily skewed to higher status; meaning of this is unclear
- Americans vote less but participate more
- Forms of participation